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Monday, March 21, 2011

Another lie from NOM and Maggie Gallagher

NOM, the National Organization for (sic) Marriage, is one of the most deceitful Religious Right groups around. Often their lies are quite subtle, as they are in this ad. They claim: "After swearing on a Bible to uphold the law and defend the Constitution, he's (Obama) made a shocking move: he unilaterally decided to no longer defend our country's Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, which is the federal law that defines marriage as between one man and one woman."

One thing about this is true, this is a federal law that defines marriage! Ron Paul, pay attention, the State's Rights excuse to defend DOMA is bullshit, even the rotund Maggie Gallagher admits as much. This is a federal definition of marriage which strips the states of the right to define marriage locally.

As for Maggie's lie, notice the way they smuggled into the oath of office something that isn't there at all. The oath of office says:

"I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Maggie smuggled into the oath something that is not there. She has her voice over artist intone that Obama swore "to uphold the law and defend the Constitution." FALSE. No president swears to uphold the law, they all swear to uphold the Constitution. Why not both? Simple; sometimes laws violate the Constitution. The president's job is to uphold the Constitution and that sometimes means refusing to defend various laws.

There is another subtle lie in Maggie's new ad (how much Mormon money funded this?). Upholding the law and defending the law are not the same thing. The Obama administration, to their shame I might add, have said they would uphold DOMA, which means enforce it. What they aren't doing is defending it in court any longer.

This is actually rather pathetic if you think about it. As much as the Right pretends to be staunch defenders of the Constitution it is Obama who is on firmer ground here. First, DOMA does violate the jurisdiction of the state's to define marriage. DOMA created a federal definition for marriage, which had never been done before. Marriage was always a state issue. So Obama is defending the Constitutional separation of powers by refusing to defend a law that violates those principles. It is the Maggies and Ron Pauls on the Right who continued to defend the unconstitutional usurpation by the federal government to define marriage.

Second, Obama's oath to uphold the Constitution requires him to oppose laws that defy constitutional limits on power. No, Obama does not do that consistently. He, like Georgie Boy before him, is a power-hungry politicians who creates powers for himself which simply don't exist in the Constitution. He supports a plethora of unconstitutional laws, and wars I might add. That doesn't change the fact that in this case he is right, and the Right is wrong. So, not only is Obama not violating his oath of office, he is actually living up to it, in this one case.

What upsets Gallagher, Morse and other bigots with messages from God, is that Obama is not violating his oath by fighting to impose a religiously defined concept into the law. Listen for just two minutes to the anti-marriage crowd on the Right and you will constant invocations of the Bible, Jesus, God, the Catholic Church, the Mormon Church, ad nauseum. The simple truth is that their religion tells them what marriage ought to be and they then want their religious beliefs enforced on everyone in the country. That has Constitutional issues as well. As hard as they try they simply haven't not come up with anything remotely convincing to support their case, outside of religion.

I am not saying the religious arguments are convincing. Please! The magic man in the sky argument only goes so far and it just doesn't get the same traction it used when most people believed in witches, demons, magic spells, portions and prayers. But in watching this debate for the last few years I've seen little in the way of rational, factual argumentation on the part of the anti-equality lobby. In the end they resort to claims of the supernatural. It was once said that patriotism is the refuge of the scoundrel, well it seems that theology is the refuge of the moron.